The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, and to an image forming system having a remote control apparatus that operates remotely said image forming apparatus via a communication network.
In recent years, various proposals have been made for image forming systems comprising image forming apparatus such as copiers that form and output images on recording media such as paper, etc., and remote control apparatuses such as PCs (personal computers) that carry out remote operation of said image forming apparatus via communication networks.
In said image forming apparatus, image forming jobs are edited and executed based on the different processing requests input either from the operation section on the chassis of the image forming apparatus or through said remote control apparatus. (See patent documents 1, 2, and 3.)
Here, said image forming job is the control data that includes the image data that is to be output, and the job ticket corresponding to that image data, and a job ticket is the data stipulating the output conditions at the time of outputting the image data, such as single side or both side printing, presence or absence of punches or staples, paper selection, magnification, number of copies output, etc., and is the data indicating the operation instructions at the time of executing the job.
Patent document 1: Japanese patent application disclosure No. 2000-357072
Patent document 2: Japanese patent application disclosure No. 2001-306204
Patent document 3: Japanese patent application disclosure No. 2000-281195
However, the following problems were present in the conventional technology described above.
That is to say, since it is difficult for the user editing a job ticket of the image forming apparatus from the remote control apparatus to verify the result of the final output, the user will find it very inconvenient because the user will have to edit the job ticket while predicting the output result in one's own mind.
In addition, in the case when the user actually makes the image forming apparatus execute the job and then directly confirms the final output result, in spite of carrying out remote operation, the user will have to actually go to the place where the image forming apparatus is located, and this is both cumbersome and laborious if the user and the image forming apparatus are in different buildings or different floors of a building. In addition, in this case, it is also uneconomical because of increased cost and wasteful use of resources.
The purpose of the present invention is to make it possible to confirm easily, from the remote control apparatus, the result of the final output from the image forming apparatus in an image forming system comprising an image forming apparatus that forms and outputs images on recording media such as paper, etc., and a remote control apparatus that carries out remote operation of said image forming apparatus via communication networks.